“It depends,” I said. “Are you going to kill us?”
He shook his head. “I’m not a murderer. I just hired one once.”
“Then I’m okay,” I said.
Monk looked up at Archie. “Do you know where I can find a broom and a dustpan?”
Monk finished sweeping up the glass into the dustpan I was holding just as the guys from the morgue zipped up the hit man’s body bag and wheeled it away. It was perfect timing.
He smiled, satisfied with himself. “Everything is cleaned up.”
“Including three murders and one desecration,” Stottlemeyer said, ambling over to us with Disher at his side. They’d spent the last hour or so interviewing Archie Applebaum. “You were right, Monk.”
“Of course I was,” Monk said. “You should know that by now.”
Stottlemeyer shrugged. “I follow the evidence where it leads me. That’s just how I’ve got to do things. I’m not big on blind faith.”
“What did Archie tell you?” I asked.
“That he’s never quite given up being a cop. Since he had the building to himself at night, he liked to snoop through the desks. One night he stumbled on the report that showed Lorber was fleecing the company and the employees out of their retirement,” Stottlemeyer said. “Archie knew that rich guys like Lorber never really do hard time and that he would get away with some of his fortune intact. But the little guys, the innocent victims like Archie, were going to lose everything.”
“So Archie decided to make sure Lorber got what he deserved,” I said.
“Archie wanted justice,” Disher said, “but he broke the law to do it.”
“At least his heart was in the right place,” I said, then turned to Monk. “Right before I drove through the window, I saw you talking to the hit man. What were you saying?”
“I asked him what he left behind in the taxi,” Monk said.
“And he told you?” Disher said.
“He was granting me my second-to-last request,” Monk said.
“What was your first?” I asked.
“That he would clean up the broken glass after he killed me,” Monk said.
“Naturally,” Stottlemeyer said.
“So what was the incriminating item he left in the taxi?” Disher said.
"His BlackBerry,” Monk said. “It slipped off his belt while he was sitting in the backseat. It had all the e-mails between him and Archie, photos of Lorber, and a diagram of the building in it. When he realized he’d forgotten it, he called it from a pay phone at the airport and Stipe answered. That’s how the hit man knew who’d found his PDA. He couldn’t take the chance that the cabbie or Stipe would scroll through his messages. So he told the cabbie to hold on to the PDA and then killed him when the man delivered it to him.”
Disher stepped up to Monk. “You did great work here today.”
“Thank you, Randy,” Monk said.
“How would you like to be a consultant to the Special Desecration Unit?” Disher asked. “We could use a man like you.”
“I’d be honored,” Monk said.
My bashed-up Jeep was evidence at a crime scene, so Stottlemeyer arranged for a patrol car to drop me off at home and to take Monk wherever he wanted to go. We got to my place first.
I was about to get out of the car when Monk touched my arm. It surprised me. Monk rarely, if ever, touched me.
“Did you really mean what you said tonight?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Every fire hydrant in the city is covered in dog pee.”
“Not that,” he said. “Do you really need me?”
I looked at him and I thought about his question. But I realized it wasn’t something I had to think about. It was something I had to feel.
“Yes, Mr. Monk, I do.”
“Not just for a paycheck?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m a very needy person.”
“Me too,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s not such a bad thing.”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
“I always am,” he said.
Don’t miss the next exciting book
in the MONK series!
MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY
Available in July 2008 from Obsidian
Read on for a sneak peek at the next
mystery starring Monk, the brilliant
investigator who always knows when
something’s out of place. . . .
It was a beautiful Monday morning, the kind that makes you want to jump onto a cable car and sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the top of your lungs.
But I wasn’t in a cable car. I was in a Buick Lucerne that my father bought me when my old Jeep finally crapped out. It was only later that I discovered the real reason for Dad’s largesse. He’d actually bought the Buick for his seventy-seven-year-old mother, who’d turned it down because she didn’t want the same car that everybody else in her retirement community was driving. Nana was afraid she’d never be able to pick her car out from the others in the parking lot.
So Nana got a black BMW 3 Series and I got a car that my fifteen-year-old daughter, Julie, won’t let me drive within a one-mile radius of her school for fear we might be seen. Supposedly Tiger Woods drives a car like mine, but if he does, I bet it’s only to haul his clubs around on the golf course.
The day was so glorious, though, that I felt like I was driving a Ferrari convertible instead of a Buick. My glee lasted until I turned the corner in front of Monk’s apartment and saw the black-and-white police car parked at the curb and the yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter of the building.
I felt a pang of fear that injected a hot shot of adrenaline into my bloodstream and made my heart race faster than a hamster on his wheel.
Since I’d met Monk, I’d
